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Tuesday, February 05, 2013

Tuesday links

From Ian:
Douglas Murray: Take Iran at Its Word
Diplomats still think the answer to the nuclear standoff is to talk to Tehran. Perhaps because they don't believe what the regime says.

“In his remarks, Rafael Bardaji, a former national security advisor to the Spanish prime minister, relayed his tale of meeting with Khamenei some years back. Summoned to breakfast while on a visit to Iran, the Spanish guests decided to ask an ice-breaking question: Within the apparently complex power structure of contemporary Iran, what was the Supreme Leader's job?
"My job," Khamenei replied, "is to set Israel on fire."They say it. They mean it. Yet still the world refuses to take them at their word. Shame on them or shame on us?”

"The echo of Danny’s words has not subsided. Koch took the dramatic act of putting it on his tombstone, but many others carry Danny’s words and are nurtured by them, quietly. For the book, we commissioned many prominent Jews to reflect on what the phrase “I am Jewish” meant to them, and Koch was one of the 300 people we asked. Koch sent in an essay mainly expressing anger about the terrorists—how they act against civilized society, and how they should be dealt with. It was about our world and how we got into this war, and we felt it didn’t fit the theme. The theme was what does being Jewish mean to you, a very personal question, and we asked Koch if he’d be open to revising it. Koch’s answer was definitive: That’s how I feel, he said, and I can’t change it."

"A Jerusalem Post columnist has said she has been targeted for vicious anti-Semitic mail from Ireland after writing about anti-Jewish comments she heard in County Kerry.
Sarah Hoenig was on a visit to Cahirsiveen in Kerry when she met school boys collecting for Palestinian rights on behalf of the Third World agency Trocaire.She wrote that they told her they hated Jews, that they had killed Jesus and that their fundraising for Palestine was endorsed by the local school."

"The official Palestinian Authority daily newspaper has accused the United States of ordering radical Islamists to commit atrocities in order to justify America's war on terror and its actions against Arabs.
A recent opinion piece in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida claims that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the US needed "a new straw man, whose existence would justify all its wars, all its conspiracies and its policies of supporting oppression."

"And then, for the first time since the early days of the last decade, the rocket fire stopped. Not stopped in the sense that the frequency of attacks on the town had been reduced -- even during official cease-fires, of which there have been four in the last six years, the town withstood occasional fire. Rather, for the first time, they have been totally stopped. December of 2012 was the first month since 2004 that there had been no rocket fire on Israel from the Gaza Strip. The official statistics aren't out yet, but January of 2013 will almost certainly be the second."

"UN Human Rights Council is unfit to judge the Middle East's only democracy Refusing to be stomped by the kangaroo in a kangaroo court, Israel has declined to participate in a United Nations dissection of its moral standing in the world."

"My opinion: Argentina has crossed a line by making a deal with the prime suspect in the 1994 terrorist attack.
I hope I’m wrong about this, but the end result of this so-called Argentina-Iran “truth commission” will be a finding saying that a handful of low-level Iranian officials were involved in the case, which allows Iran’s regime to claim it didn’t have anything to do with it, and Argentina to claim it has solved the case.That would amount to a big blow to justice, and an insult to the memory of the 85 Jews and non-Jews who died in the terrorist attack."

"The two-day conference, held on January 17-18, was attended by senior Iranian officials, including Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani, who described Israel as "a Zionist plague that arrived in the Middle East," and his advisor Hossein Sheikh Al-Islam, who called to launch a third Intifada in the West Bank."

"Ignored for almost 25-years as an unverified conspiracy theory, the respected New York Times journalist and Middle-East expert Robert Worth claims in a recent piece that a former CIA operative confirmed to him an Iranian role in the December bombing.
The controversial claim that 'the best intelligence' on the Lockerbie bombing leads to Iran, rewrites a quarter of a century of accepted history that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's Libya ordered the terror outrage as revenge for a 1986 U.S. attack on the North African country."

"Space tourist Anousheh Ansari was the first Iranian to make a journey into space aboard a Soyuz TMA-9 capsule from Baikonur, Kazakhastan, in September 2006. The 40-year-old telecommunications entrepreneur paid a reported $20 million for a space station visit. Her journey became an inspiration to women in male-dominated Iran."

"Sen. McCain came under fire after posting tweet comparing Ahmadinejad to the monkey the Iranian government claims it launched into space.
“So Ahmadinejad wants to be first Iranian in space - wasn't he just there last week?” McCain tweeted, citing a recent Yahoo News story: “Iran launches monkey into space.”

Blood test for Alzheimer’s
An Israeli company’s experimental blood test can detect dementia while the disease is still mild enough to treat more effectively.

“Today one of the main weaknesses in the Alzheimer’s area is that patients don’t find out until it’s too late,” says Ilya Budik, CEO of NeuroQuest, an Israeli company developing a novel blood test for early detection of the most common cause of dementia worldwide.
“There are many new therapies under development, and the most successful trials are showing the earlier a patient is treated, the better likelihood of responding to the treatment,” he says."

Among many Middle East analysts, particularly those of the so-called "realist" school of foreign policy thought, "linkage" is a holy doctrine. It holds that peaceful compromise between Israel and the Palestinians will lead to a generally placid Middle East. But it's a false notion. One of its more famous advocates is Chuck Hagel, President Obama's nominee to be secretary of defense.

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